UK gay men are less frequently contracting HIV, according to the AIDS Map.
Public Health England recently released numbers on the amount of gay and bisexual men who have been diagnosed with HIV in the past few years.
Their records show that the number has been dropping in the past two years. While it reached 2290 in 2015, it then hit 2820 in 2016 and 2330 in 2017. That’s a 31% drop between 2015 and 2017.
On top of that, the biggest fall happened in London with diagnoses dropping to 41% whereas outside of London it was down 30%.
It wasn’t just gay men who saw this drop in diagnoses however as the total of 4363 people who were diagnosed with HIV in 2017 was lower than the 6043 in 2015 and the 5280 in 2016.
Current guesses are that the increase of HIV testing could have caused this general drop in diagnoses, but experts can’t confirm that idea just yet.
Unfortunately, it’s not all good news though as the percentage of people diagnosed late did not get better.
As the AIDS Map reports;
“42% of all diagnoses were made with a CD4 cell count below 350/mm3. The highest rates are in heterosexual men (58% and 72% in black African heterosexual men) but also of great concern in heterosexual women (50%) and injecting drug users (47%). The rates are lower in gay and bisexual men (32%).”
While all of this information has just been released, there’s even more waiting to be published through a full analysis that will drop in November.
h/t: AIDS Map